Your MacBook Has a Force Field. This Is What It Looks Like

The painted electromagnetic field of a Macbook. Image: Luke Sturgeon and Shamik Ray

The painted electromagnetic field of a Macbook. Image: Luke Sturgeon and Shamik Ray

The painted electromagnetic field of a radio. Image: Luke Sturgeon and Shamik Ray

The painted electromagnetic field of a radio. Image: Luke Sturgeon and Shamik Ray

The painted electromagnetic field of a radio. Image: Luke Sturgeon and Shamik Ray

The painted electromagnetic field of a radio. Image: Luke Sturgeon and Shamik Ray

That laptop in front of you is hiding a beautiful secret. Radiating from its hard drive, optical drive and tiny motors is a force field of magnetic and electric charges. Called an electromagnetic field, it’s invisible to the human eye—usually. But a recent project from two designers at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design have made the invisible visible. Luke Sturgeon and Shamik Ray have created light paintings from the EMFs emitting from our everyday electronics. The result are ghoulishly pretty images showing wisps of light floating above a laptop and flowing from a radio’s speaker.

The project was part of a week-long experimental imaging workshop at CIID that asked students to visualize the invisible everyday phenomena, no digital retouching allowed. To get their images, Sturgeon and Ray holed themselves up in a pitch-black, totally silent room for three days to experiment with different visualizations and processes. They ended up creating their own Android app in Processing that would allow them draw and map EMFs. The phone, with its built-in magnetic sensors, acted as a sort of “light brush” that reacted based on the strength of the EMF being read. To capture the streak of light coming from the radio, they would slowly drag the phone over the device and wait for the long exposure image to process. “The gratification that came from capturing each exposure reflects the similar experience in dark-room photography, slowly watching each photograph develop,” Sturgeon explained. “We were surprised by the difference in magnetic strengths between objects and how strong the electromagnetic field is around hard drives and laptop computers and mobile phones, all of which we live in constant close proximity to every day.”

Though the images are beautiful, the information we can glean from them is still abstract. Sturgeon says they don’t yet have a way to quantify how strong each EMF is, though he notes that the EMF from the laptop hard drive was so strong it would stall the phone’s magnetic sensor. Ultimately, the team would like to use the research they’ve done to create a standardized method to visually monitor a device’s EMF. “We would like to define a suitable and consistent visual language that can be used to measure and compare any type of object that emits a magnetic field,” Sturgeon said.

The EMF floating above a radio speaker. Image: Luke Sturgeon and Shamik Ray